Rain gauges, in their most common form as a graduated open-top cylinder, have been used for many years in man's attempt to analyze and measure one environmental aspect, which is rainfall.
The common open-top, clear plastic or glass, graduated cylinder can be accurate in its measurement of rainfall when the rain is falling perpendicular to the earth or ground. However, problems arise because rainfall is usually not perpendicular to the ground. Rather, the rain falls as the result of violent weather conditions in which the wind and rain are blowing in many directions and angles. In these situations, the open-top, clear plastic or glass cylinder becomes quite inadequate for its intended purpose. The reason for this is that the rain, when analyzed from a cross section of the perpendicular direction in which it falls, generally views a circular opening to the rain collecting cylinder. To the contrary, the rain falling at a substantial angle to the perpendicular, views the circular opening to the graduated cylinder as having an elliptical shape. Accordingly, the greater the angle at which the rain is being blown or driven, the greater the elliptical effect and corresponding decrease in accuracy with regard to the open-top, graduated cylinder rain gauge.
Existing rain gauges include rain collectors that can have large numerals and/or words indicating the height of the water collected in the rain collector. These rain collectors usually contain indications, such as lines to indicate the graduations of water height. Corresponding to these indications are usually numerals that can be small or very large. The large numbers can be printed directly on the curved surfaces of these rain collectors provided the collectors are large enough to accommodate the expanded scales. However, with other or smaller rain gauges which have a normal numerical scale and are a low-cost glass tube collector, the area might be insufficient to print large clear numbers that can be easily read due to the reduced size and curved surface of the collector. In addition, many of the existing rain gauges require a manual dumping of the graduated cylinders to achieve an accurate measurement of rainfall, for each measurement.
Thus, a need exists for a self-dumping rain gauge in which the numbers, that indicate the amount of rain that has fallen, are exceptionally easy to read.
A need exists to provide a rain gauge capable of an exceptionally clear indication of water height and rainfall measurement on the rain gauge, and that is relatively inexpensive to manufacture.
The embodiments meet these needs.
The embodiments are detailed below with reference to the listed Figures.